Imperialism, Globalisation and the way forward

Opposition to globalisation has spread rapidly across the world, as more and more recognise the awesome power of the giant corporations that straddle the globe and the carnage they leave in their wake. From Seattle to Prague, from Nice to Quebec, hundreds of thousands of workers and youth have forcefully demonstrated against the World Trade Organisation and the various international summits that defend the power of global capitalism. But how can we effectively challenge the forces of imperialism and globalisation?

"Highly developed nations can use free trade to
extend their power and their control of the world's wealth, and businesses can use it as a weapon against
labour." Arthur MacEwan

"We will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for
addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but also those of our allies or friends; our
overall objective is to remain
the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and
Western access to the region's oil." Pentagon draft of Defence Planning Guidance, February 1992

Opposition to globalisation has spread rapidly across the world,
as more and more recognise the awesome power of the giant
corporations that straddle the globe and the carnage they leave in
their wake. From Seattle to Prague, from Nice to Quebec, hundreds of
thousands of workers and youth have forcefully demonstrated against
the World Trade Organisation and the various international summits
that defend the power of global capitalism.

In the United States, the citadel of world capitalism, opinion
polls have demonstrated that a big section of the American population
are opposed to the domination of Corporate America. In a poll
conducted by BusinessWeek, 72% of Americans said that business had
too much power over too many aspects of American life. Only 47%
thought that 'what was good for business was good for most
Americans', while 66% believed that large profits are more important
to big companies than developing safe, reliable, quality products for
consumers. "At home and abroad", states BusinessWeek, "citizens
facing globalisation worry that powerful corporations override
national sovereignty and can undermine political and monetary
systems." (11th September 2000) In Britain, amid the anti-capitalist
May Day protests, opinion polls in the capital showed widespread
sympathy for the aims of the demonstrators. While in France people
have made a hero of a local farmer who trashed a MacDonalds, not
simply because they hate fast-food, but because multinationals crush
local culture. Even after a nine-year boom, there is a growing
questioning of the capitalist system, with opposition to the greed
and inequality that accompanies it.

In Britain there is a massive revulsion against privatisation,
which is seen as simply a racket to plunder state assets and make
massive profits at the expense of ordinary people. Despite Thatcher's
so-called revolution (in reality 'counter-revolution', now heralded
by Blair and Co., even a majority of Conservative voters are now
opposed to privatisation. This is a new development and has spread
alarm amongst the serious strategists of Capital and their shadows in
the labour movement.

"All those college students who show up at demonstrations against
globalisation", states 'BusinessWeek', "see corporations such as Nike
Inc. as self-serving organisations that violate human rights and
pollute the earth. Even teens think it's cool to hate corporations."
In schools and colleges, groups like the Student Committee Against
Labour Exploitation have sprung up.

This anti-capitalist feeling - for that is what it represents - is
most prevalent amongst the youth. Increasingly young people are
beginning to rebel against a system that regards profit-making as a
religion. They can see how global companies like MacDonalds, Nike and
Microsoft are cartels that have no interest apart from conquering new
areas of the world and making astronomical profits. They are
desperate to exploit cheap labour in any apart of the world in the
cause of "globalisation" and "free enterprise". They are determined
to ride rough shod over the workers and oppressed of the world in the
name of "free trade".

At the Summit of the Americas in Quebec, US President George Bush
proclaimed that free trade and open borders would create jobs and
boost income everywhere. "We seek freedom, not only for people living
within our borders, but also for commerce moving across our borders,"
he said. He used the seven-year old North American Free Trade Area
between the US, Mexico and Canada as an example to be followed
elsewhere. But while big business reaps super-profits world-wide, the
workers are subjected to super-exploitation at the hands of the
corporate giants.

Consequences

Nevertheless, others at the Summit, while welcoming increased
globalisation, feared the social consequences. "There is much wealth,
but there is still much that we need to address", warned Mexican
President Fox, demagogically echoing the concerns about the
polarisation of wealth in Mexico as well as the fear of revolutionary
upheavals. "Our region continues to be one of the most inequitable
regions in the world - 220 million Latin Americans live in poverty,"
he continued.

Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean supply cheap labour for
foreign assembly plants, such as the maquiladora industries of
northern Mexico, where harsh working conditions, low wages, and the
absence of environmental controls offer highly profitable conditions
for investors.

Ezequiel Tinajero was 16 when he went to work at the Auto Trim
plant in Matamoros on Mexico's northern border with the US. For 12
hours a day, Monday to Saturday, he glued leather trim to the
steering wheels of luxury cars.

For most of that time, he was exposed to toxic glues and solvents
in a factory with limited ventilation. By the time he reached his
20s, he was suffering from chronic nausea, headaches and breathing
problems, and his hair had begun to fall out. In 1995, his wife gave
birth to a daughter with anencephaly, a rare condition in which the
child has no brain. The baby died two hours after birth.

This is the true story, one of many, told by auto Trim workers
last December in an inquiry into NAFTA. There have been no penalties
or fines against these multinationals that benefit from the opening
up of markets. Neither free trade nor protection, said Marx, have
anything to offer the working class. Only the replacement of
capitalism with a harmonious planned economy based upon production
for need not profit, can offer a way out. Under capitalism, the likes
of Ezequiel Tinajero are small change for the corporate bosses.

This thirst for world domination and exploitation is nothing new
to capitalism. Globalisation itself is a product of capitalism. From
so-called free competition capitalism has evolved into monopoly
capitalism, where a handful of giant corporations dominate the globe
and have more power than any elected government. They use their
economic muscle to crush all opposition. They buy politicians of all
colours and engage in corruption as a means of protecting their
system.

As Marx and Engels explained in the 'Communist Manifesto': "The
bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production,
and with them the relations of society. Conservation of the old modes
of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first
condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant
revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all
social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish
the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober
senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his
kind".

"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of
production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication,
draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The
cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it
batters down all Chinese walls. It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels
them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e.,
to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after
its own image."

It carries through this process in the most violent manner,
through wars of conquest and subjugation. In the highest stage of
capitalism, imperialism, the world is completely divided up between
the main imperialist powers. According to the US President Theodore
Roosevelt, "the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with
savages," establishing the rule of "the dominant world races." This
was the great vision of the ruling class in the United States, which
has changed little in two hundred years. "In the post-world war two
era", states Noam Chomsky, "the US has been the global enforcer,
guaranteeing the interests of privilege. It has, therefore, complied
an impressive record of aggression, international terrorism,
slaughter, torture, chemical and biological warfare, human rights
abuses of every imaginable variety."

Today, the collective exploitation of the 'third world' is carried
out by the regional blocs around the United States, the European
Union and Japan. Their agencies are the World Bank, the IMF and the
World Trade Organisation. Their domination of the globe is dressed-up
as 'free trade' and 'open markets' for the benefit of all. The
director of India's Working Group on Patent Laws comments that "the
levels of contradiction and hypocrisy are breathtaking." The rich
"call for competitiveness, but what they want is monopoly. It is
blackmail. They are seeking to do through economic rules what
formally the powerful did through armies of invasion and occupation.
The manager of a Bombay drug company adds that the west "protected
their own infant industries, and they pirated the world to create
wealth; and now preach to other countries to practice what they never
did themselves."

Imperialism

Lenin wrote of this imperialist epoch in his book, "Imperialism -
the Highest stage of capitalism". Here he described the development
of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism, with the
fusion of the capitalist state and finance capital. "Thus, the
principle stages in the history of monopolies are the following: 1)
1860-70, the highest stage, the apex of development of free
competition; monopoly is in the barely discernible, embryonic stage.
2) After the crisis of 1873, a wide zone of development of cartels;
but they are still the exception. They are not yet durable. They are
still a transitory phenomenon. 3) The boom at the end of the
nineteenth century and the crisis of 1900-03. Cartels become one of
the foundations of the whole of economic life. Capitalism has been
transformed into imperialism." And further: "Cartels come to an
agreement on the conditions of sale, terms of payment, etc. They
divide the markets among themselves. They fix the quantity of goods
to be produced. They fix prices. They divide the profits among the
various enterprises, etc." Today, such is the degree of
monopolisation that a mere 500 companies dominate the world market.

However since Lenin wrote, imperialism has changed its method of
rule. Rather than direct military conquest and subjugation, the
imperialist powers dominate the world through their economic might
and through the terms of trade. The high price of industrial goods is
exchanged for low cost primary products. The ex-colonial world is
forced to exchange more labour for less labour. The ex-colonial world
is also crushed by the world powers by colossal indebtedness and the
ruthless policies pursued by the IMF and World Bank. They are forced
to tear down their tariff barriers and open up their markets to the
imperialist powers. In the process, they are instructed to
denationalise their utilities and cut subsidies on essentials such as
food and fuel, education and health, pushing the population into
deeper misery.

Violence

This does not mean that the imperialists do not use military means
to further their aims. Far from it. The bombing of Serbia and Iraq
are a reminder of the violence that is inflicted upon all those who
dare challenge their power or interests. The imperialists,
particularly US imperialism aided by its poodle Britain,
indiscriminately bomb Iraq as a warning to the peoples of the 'third
world' not to get out of line.

In an article written in the 'Financial Times' by James Morgan,
the economic correspondent of the BBC World Service, the headline
was: "The fall of the Soviet bloc has left the IMF and G7 to rule the
world and create a new imperial age." This was none other than Bush's
'New World Order'. The crushing economic and political domination of
the United States as the single world superpower, is unique in
history.

The USA is the most counterrevolutionary force on the planet. The
crushing domination of imperialism in the world arena, which was
strengthened after the fall of Stalinism, has meant an increased
exploitation of the 'third world' as a whole. The United States has
intervened continually in its own "backyard", from Guatemala to
Panama, from El Salvador to Chile to safeguard its interests. It now
acts as the policeman of the world.

The US military manuals of the early 1960s, when America was
stepping up its intervention in South East Asia, advocated "the
tactic of intimidation, kidnapping, or assassinating carefully
selected members of the opposition in a manner that will reap the
maximum psychological benefit," the objective being "to frighten
everyone from collaborating with the guerrilla movement." A similar
technique is being developed in Colombia, where the US has committed
over $1.3 billion in its efforts to crush the guerrillas.

The 'third world' is not only treated as an area for exploitation,
but for dumping and experimentation. It is here that imperialism
plays out its proxy wars, as can be witnessed in Africa. Western
'development' programmes promote cigarettes, drugs and pesticides in
much the same way as Britain imposed opium on the Chinese 150 years
ago. In Costa Rica, "legal pesticides - many of them imported from
the United States - are making people sick, injuring them, even
killing them," Christopher Scanlan reports in the 'Miami Herald' from
Pitahaya, where a 15-year old farm worker had just died of poisoning
by a highly toxic American Cyanamid product. The village cemetery of
Pitahaya, he continues, "is a stark symbol of a global death toll
from pesticides estimated at 220,000 a year by the World Health
Organisation," along with 25 million incidents of illness, including
chronic neurological damage; the Guaymi Indians who die from
pesticide poisoning cleaning drainage ditches at US-owned plantations
in Costa Rica and Panama are unlikely to make it to the village
cemetery. More than 99% of deaths from acute pesticide poisoning
occur in 'third world' countries, which use 20% of agricultural
chemicals.

With "markets closed at home" by regulation to protect the
population and the environment, "chemical companies shifted sales of
these banned chemicals to the Third World where government
regulations are weak." The corporations have also devised new
"nonpersistent" pesticides that "are generally much more acutely
toxic" to farm workers and their families, including some "first
developed as nerve gas by the Germans before World War Two."

The ex-colonial world

The subjugation of the ex-colonial world has served to introduce
the worse feature of capitalism. The squeeze on the 'third world'
grinds the working masses deeper into poverty and squalor. As a
consequence child labour or child slavery has become endemic and a
valuable source of cheap labour for the multinationals. Amid
potential riches, there is hunger and general misery. India alone is
reported to have some 14 million child labourers, aged six and up,
many working under conditions of virtual slavery for up to 16 hours a
day.

The increased toll, even to the point of death through overwork,
results from the "frenzied export drive". In Thailand, hailed again
as another "success story for capitalism", we see a picture straight
from Marx's Capital on the Working Day. Cambodia specialist Michael
Vickery gives a sample, including cases of teenagers "freed" from a
factory where they were allegedly detained for slave labour and
tortured," tied up and beaten when they became too tired to work
after 18-hour shifts; eighteen girls aged 12-14 rescued from a
textile mill where they worked for over 15 hours a day "for almost no
pay"; teenagers fleeing from poverty in the Northeast dragooned into
factories or forced into brothels.

Living hell

This living hell created by capitalism is an integral part of the
world economy. Those who talk glibly about reforming the system fail
to understand the nature of capitalism. Exploitation is the essence
of the capitalist system, with all the human degradation that goes
with it. The multinationals depend upon cheap labour in the 'third
world' as much as cheap labour in the west. For them a world without
regulation and trade unions is the ideal world for making profits.
The threat of "globalisation" to which all countries must bow down is
used to intimidate and break the resistance of workers to capital.

All the talk about the cancellation of debt for the poorest
countries always ends in practice in a greater debt burden as a
result of the conditions attached. To qualify for debt assistance,
the countries involved have to put in practice the "recommendations"
of the IMF. Failure to do so means to defy world capitalism, with all
the ills that follow.

As Lenin explained, "Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for
domination instead of the striving for liberty, the exploitation of
an increasing number of small or weak nations by an extremely small
group of the richest or most powerful nations - all these have given
birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which
compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism."

However, the increased power of the monopolies has not made
capitalism more stable, but on the contrary, it is riddled with
contradictions and tensions. There is a continuous drive to dominate
the world market, in a cut-throat rivalry, which adds to growing
trade frictions world-wide. As the world economy moves towards slump,
these will multiply a hundred-fold.

Capitalism has created its grave-digger in the form of the working
class. The impasse of the system has already provoked revolutionary
crises and developments in South Asia and Latin America. Even in
Europe, as witnessed by the general strikes in Greece and the strikes
in France, things are beginning to develop.

Capitalism cannot be "reformed" into a humane system without its
poverty wages and exploitation. It would be like teaching a tiger to
live on vegetables. Profits come from the unpaid labour of the
working class. That is why there is constant pressure to drive down
wages, and multinationals threaten to close down their factories and
relocate where wage costs are lower, irrespective of the social
consequences.

The organs of imperialism, the IMF, World Bank, and the WTO, will
always act in the class interests of the monopolies. That is their
function. As long as the capitalists rule the earth, then despite the
potential for plenty, billions will live in misery. While big
business dominates the planet an environmental disaster unfolds
before our very eyes.

Capitalism has created the world market and established the
material basis for a new classless society. Ninety-five percent of
scientists who have ever lived are alive today. Unfortunately, under
this system their services are employed in the interests of big
business. Through world-wide patents on medicines and agricultural
products, as highlighted by the anti-AIDS drugs scandal in South
Africa, they cripple the 'third world' through exorbitant prices and
keep their monopoly-profits intact.

Only by eliminating capitalism internationally can production be
geared to need and not profit. Only by ending the power of
imperialism can the resources of the world be harmoniously developed
and planned in the interests of all peoples. A world socialist
revolution can break the power of the monopolies , and introduce a
planned world economy using the resources and talents of the world's
population. Only in this way can we end the pollution and rape of the
world's resources in the interests of profit. War, poverty and hunger
can be eliminated, and a new chapter opened up for the future of
humankind. The protests in Seattle and elsewhere are only the first
rumblings in the movement to change society. It is down to the new
generation to arm themselves with a Marxist programme and prepare the
way for the revolutionary events that lie ahead.